GENOCIDE DEBATE
Kathimerini, Greece
March 16 2006
Some 70 Turkish and foreign academics gathered in Istanbul yesterday
for a three-day conference to discuss whether the massacres of
Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide or not. In a rare
move, the gathering, organized by the Istanbul state university,
offered the floor to academics of all convictions even though it was
largely dominated by historians and officials who defend Turkey’s
official position on the 1915-17 killings. Yair Auron, an Israeli
researcher of Jewish archives from Ottoman times, openly used the term
“genocide” and appealed to Turks to question their past.